Wednesday, February 25, 2015

The Interview is the
project that started out as just another raunchy modern comedy from the team of
James Franco and Seth Rogen, directed by Rogen and his filmmaking partner Evan
Goldberg from a story they worked up with Dan Sterling, though Sterling gets
sole credit for the actual script. As all the world knows by now, the film
casts Franco as Dave Skylark, host of an Entertainment Tonight-style bottom-feeding show whose specialty is getting
celebrities to reveal unexpected truths about themselves, especially about
their sexual practices — in a rather odd opening scene he interviews Eminem
(playing himself) and gets Eminem to reveal that the only reason he recorded
those anti-Gay raps was because he’s actually Gay. Rogen plays Aaron Rapoport,
Dave’s long-suffering producer who wishes he were on 60 Minutes doing serious news reporting instead of hosting long
debates on whether Matthew McConaughey sleeps with goats and the shape of Miley
Cyrus’s vagina. Early on in the movie they discover that, though North Korean
dictator Kim Jong Un hates America and teaches his people to wish for our utter
destruction (the opening is a screamingly funny scene of a North Korean girl
singing a bloodthirsty song about this — some of the words, in Korean but
helpfully given subtitles, are, “Die America, die. Oh
please won’t you die? It would fill my tiny little heart with joy. May your
women all be raped by beasts of the jungle while your children are foooorced to
watch!”), he’s a big fan of U.S. television in general and two shows — The Big Bang Theory and
Dave’s show, Skylark Tonite, in particular.
This gives Dave and Aaron the idea to get news cred for their program by asking
Kim Jong Un for an interview — at a time when Kim has not only developed a
nuclear arsenal but is threatening to launch it and obliterate the west coast
of the U.S. Aaron figures out that since North Korea participates in the
Olympics there must be some sort of contact
between the famously isolated regime and the outside world, he traces it, and
within a week Kim’s publicity person, Sook (Diana Bang), has called him back
announcing a rendezvous point in China, where — in the middle of nowhere, and
leaving Aaron no way to get home — she gets off a helicopter and tells him that
Kim will be available for a one-hour interview as long as he and Dave agree to
ask only questions that will be pre-scripted in advance from her office. They
agree — Aaron says that’s a violation of news protocol but Dave couldn’t care
less; he wants the “get” for his low-rated show — and then they’re contacted by
the CIA in the person of agents Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) and Botwin (Reese
Alexander), who want to recruit — more like order — Dave to “take him out” when
they meet Kim for the interview. “For drinks?” asks Aaron. “Take out … like to
dinner?” asks Dave.

It suddenly dawns on our two comic naïfs that what the CIA agents really want them to do is use their access
to Kim to kill him, and they have an elaborate device for them to do so: a skin
patch containing ricin which they are to apply to Kim as he shakes hands with
them. (One imdb.com contributor posted to the “Goofs” section that this is
factually inaccurate — according to the Wikipedia page on ricin, it’s poisonous
only if “inhaled, injected or ingested” — though I suspect writers Rogen,
Goldberg and Sterling deliberately used a murder method that would be
ineffective to avoid presenting what the old Production Code called “imitable
details of crime” — i.e., they wanted a murder technique you could not try at home.) The CIA outfits Dave with a carrying bag in
which they conceal the ricin patch, but Dave decides the bag is unstylish and
instead insists on carrying his own and hiding the ricin in chewing gum —
whereupon it’s discovered instantly and one of Kim’s security guards chews the
gum. The CIA then decides to take two additional patches and ship them to Dave
and Aaron via drone — Aaron has to go outside and pick up the projectile
containing them, where he’s attacked by a Siberian tiger and saved only when
the projectile takes out the tiger, then there’s a long and not especially
funny scene in which to hide the projectile from the Korean security guards who
are coming to arrest him, Aaron has to shove it up his ass (an all too typical
scene in what passes for movie “comedy” these days). Meanwhile, in one of the
film’s most genuinely funny sequences, Kim launches an all-out charm offensive
on Dave, taking him to fancy meals, shooting hoops with him (reflecting the
original inspiration of the story in former basketball star Dennis Rodman’s
trip to North Korea to meet the real Kim
Jong Un) and showing him a fully-stocked grocery store with a fat kid standing
outside to refute the accusation that Kim is starving his people and spending
all the government’s money on nuclear weapons. Only when Dave discovers that
the grocery store is literally a Potemkin village — all the food in it, including the grapefruit, is fake, replicas
made of cement — and he stumbles into a meeting in which Kim goes crazy and
announces his intention to nuke half the world just to prove what a great man
he is, he’s on board for the assassination plot again; and Sook, apparently a
faithful servant of the regime, turns out to be a revolutionary waiting for the
chance to get rid of Kim, though she warns Dave that if he kills Kim they’ll
just replace him with someone as bad or worse and what he has to do is get Kim
to break down on the air so it will embarrass the regime and it will lose all
legitimacy in the eyes of the North Korean people.

Needless to say, part of the
embarrassment process will be the revelation that Kim Jong Un shits and pisses
like any normal person — part of the North Korean propaganda creating his
personality cult has been to say that he expends so much energy working
tirelessly on behalf of the people that he doesn’t have to excrete in the
normal human (or animal) fashion — and there’s a big action climax which
involves Aaron getting his fingers bitten off by one of Kim’s security people
in the most blatantly fake-looking gross-out comedy scene since the duel with
the Green Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Interview got
wretched reviews when it was finally issued — after a comedy of errors in which
Kim Jong Un, showing himself to be almost as much of an asshole in real life as
he’s portrayed in the film, denounced the release of the movie as “an act of
war” by the U.S. (and presumably Japan, home base of Columbia’s parent company,
Sony) on his country, and a group calling itself the “Guardians of Peace”
hacked into Sony’s computer system, stealing complete computer files of five
finished films (including the Black remake of Annie) and a lot of embarrassing e-mails in which Columbia
executives said, among other things, that they thought President Obama’s taste
in movies ran exclusively to ones about Black people and George Clooney had
lost his touch with popular taste by making The Monuments Men (which accounts for all those Horn Blows at Midnight-style self-deprecating jokes Clooney made about his film on the
Golden Globe Awards). Though the North Korean government denied it, the FBI
became convinced that they were behind the
Sony hack (this has been questioned by some people who’ve investigated the
“Guardians of Peace”’s public statements and suggested that the mistakes in
their English are characteristic of people whose native language is Russian,
not Korean), and in addition there were threats to attack any theatres that
dared show The Interview. So some of
America’s biggest theatre chains refused to run the film, Columbia pulled it
from release, illegal Internet pirates said they had obtained the film and would put it out if Columbia didn’t,
President Obama and others weighed in and attacked Columbia for cowardice in
the face of terrorist threats, calling on the studio to support freedom of expression
by releasing the movie — which they eventually did, first online and then in
whatever theatres would agree to run it. (In San Diego the only place it showed
publicly was the Media Arts Center in North Park.)

When The Interview finally came out the critics mostly trashed it — unfairly, I
think; it’s hardly in the same league as the classic political satires to which
it was inevitably compared (the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove
— the last also a Columbia movie) but it’s reasonably entertaining within the
limits of the Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg school of comedy. Some of it is
genuinely witty and a few bits — particularly Randall Park’s performance as Kim
Jong Un, which got singled out by most reviewers as the one bright spot in an
otherwise dreary film — even approach pathos. If The Interview has a flaw, it’s in the clash between its ambitions towards
political satire and Rogen’s and Goldberg’s knowledge that what their audience
wants is raunchy, titillating sex- and drug-soaked humor. Originally Rogen,
Goldberg and Sterling were going to take the usual cop-out and make the setting
a totally fictional country — which, as I told Charles after we watched it,
would have made it more like the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies than the models that inevitably got cited — but then
they made the fateful decision to use the real names of North Korea (actually
its own name for itself is “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” or “DPRK”
for short) and Kim Jong Un. This undoubtedly got the film more public attention
than it would have received otherwise — if it had been about a fictional
country and dictator it probably would have come and went, reaching the
audience Franco and Rogen have built up in their previous films together in the
genre but not much beyond that — but it
also built up a lot of audience expectations critics gleefully tore down.
Indeed, probably the best comment was made by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as hosts
of the Golden Globes; in their introduction they said that by making the film
an international cause celêbre in human
rights and freedom, “they forced us all to pretend that we really wanted to see
it.” For all its raunchiness and frank unbelievability, The Interview is actually a fun film — though I think I liked Pineapple
Express, the only previous Franco-Rogen film
I’ve seen, better because it was just a
stoner comedy (the title referred to an especially potent strain of marijuana
supposedly developed by the U.S. government in the 1930’s as a possible
bioweapon) without the satirical pretensions of The Interview. I could probably go on yes-butting The Interview all day, but for all its weaknesses it’s still good clean
dirty fun, hardly a deathless classic but still entertaining to watch.

Monday, February 23, 2015

Last night I watched the 87th
annual Academy Awards telecast, a rather dispiriting spectacle — it was compact
and well organized, lasting just three hours and 40 minutes (almost an hour
shorter than the Grammy Awards), but it wasn’t terribly interesting, though
having surprisingly little skin in the game (I don’t think I’ve seen any of the eight films that were nominated for Best
Picture) I may simply not have cared that much if one intellectually
pretentious movie with a single-word seven-letter title beginning with “B” beat
out another intellectually pretentious movie with a single-word seven-letter
title beginning with “B” for Best Picture. The two movies in question were Birdman and Boyhood, and Birdman (saddled
with the ridiculous subtitle Or: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) won. It’s the story of an actor who once was a
major movie star playing a superhero — cast with Michael Keaton, an actor who
was once a major movie star playing a superhero (Batman in Tim Burton’s two
films involving the character) — who’s attempting a comeback on the Broadway
stage and whose divo
hissy-fits are getting in the way. I hadn’t realized it until last night that
it’s really a remake of the John Barrymore plot thread of Dinner at Eight (1933)! Charles, who came home from work after the
whole thing was over, said he’d seen Boyhood on his most recent trip to the Bay Area to see his
family; Boyhood got Brownie points for the
sheer audacity of its concept (a boy matures from 5 to 17 and director Richard
Linklater actually filmed the movie in bits and pieces over 12 years so that
instead of casting the boy with multiple actors he could use the same one,
Einar Coltrane, as he naturally aged — there’ve been precedents, including
Michael Apted’s Up documentaries and the
cycle of five films François Truffaut made with actor Jean-Pierre Léaud over
the years, starting with The 400 Blows, that had Léaud play the same character as he aged from troubled
adolescent to middle-aged man). Boyhood’s only win was Patricia Arquette for Best Supporting Actress (playing
Einar Coltrane’s mom) and the only win for Selma, which eked out a Best Picture nomination though
its Black woman director was shut out of that category, was Best Song (John
Legend and rapper Common for “Glory” — they took the songwriting credit under
their real names, John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn.

Birdman won four awards, including three of the big ones —
Best Picture, Best Director (Alejandro
G. Iñárritu, who joked during his acceptance speech that he’s
the second Mexican director to win in a row) and Best Original Screenplay as
well as Best Cinematography — while the other major winners were The Grand
Budapest Hotel and, of all things, Whiplash, which is basically the boot-camp scenes of Full Metal Jacket transferred to the world
of music education, with the sadistic teacher browbeating his charges into
either better performances or nervous breakdowns. In some respects the
production numbers were stronger than the awards portions of the show — Lady
Gaga once again showed off her chops as a standards singer with a medley of
songs from The Sound of Music (she’s more suited to the urbanity of the Rodgers and Hart songs than
the sentimentality of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ones, but she still did quite
well) that introduced a surprisingly well-preserved Julie Andrews as one of the
presenters. Host Neil Patrick Harris did a leaden opening number, yet another
tribute in song to the movie industry, with a pretend heckler from the
audience; he also told some pretty lame jokes about the male participants’
bodies (I expect him any day now to come out with an ad in which he says, “I’m
not Gay; I just play one on awards shows!”) but he was a decent, inoffensive
host. Indeed, “inoffensive” was probably the word that would best describe last
night’s show — no wardrobe malfunctions, no bizarre production numbers like
that one they did one year in which Rob Lowe looked like he was about to lead a
gang-rape of Snow White — though there was a lot of political and social commentary, not only from
people you’d expect it (like Laura Poitras, director of the Best Feature
Documentary winner CitizenFour, about Edward Snowden) but people you wouldn’t (like Patricia
Arquette). Best Actress went to Julianne Moore for playing an Alzheimer’s
patient in Still Alice — a
movie that won nothing else — and Best Actor went to Eddie Redmayne for playing
Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (so the guy who played the straight British
scientist beat out Benedict Cumberbatch, the guy who played the Gay British scientist Alan Turing in The Imitation
Game). One can readily imagine
the knives coming out on talk radio and Fox News about “liberal Hollywood” at
its most self-congratulatory — and the show did put an awful lot of people of color on stage to
make up for how few of them the Academy actually nominated for awards!

Sunday, February 22, 2015

The films Charles and I watched last night were part of an
EMI Records package (back when EMI still existed as a separate company before
the relentless forces of corporate consolidation ended up absorbing it, with
the Universal Music Group purchasing Capitol and EMI’s other popular labels
while the classical catalog ended up at Warners Music Group — with the bizarre
result that the back catalog of EMI’s classical division is now being reissued
under something called “Warner Classical,” ironic because in its heyday, when
it was still associated with the movie studio that shares its name, Warner
Bros. was notorious as the one major record company that hardly bothered with
classical music!) released in 1999 called Callas: Life and Art, containing two CD’s of opera excerpts abstracted
from Maria Callas’ EMI studio recordings (some of them recorded as excerpts,
some “clipped” from complete-opera recordings) and a DVD containing a
documentary, also called Maria Callas: Life and Art, along with what was billed as “excerpts” from a
concert she gave in Hamburg, Germany on March 16, 1962 but which seems to be
the entire telecast. I had a previous version of this I’d video-recorded off what is now the Arts & Entertainment network, and the only selection
missing here that was on my earlier copy is the orchestra (the North German
Radio) under conductor Georges Prêtre playing the overture to Verdi’s La
Forza del Destino. To my mind, the very
best posthumous documentary on Callas was the first one, shown on PBS in 1978
(just a year after her death in late 1977 — a perilous time for celebrity
legends; Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley also died
in the last half of 1977) and featuring some of the same people interviewed in
this one (notably director Franco Zeffirelli) but offered more (and longer)
clips of Callas actually performing. Written and directed by Alan Lewens and
Alistair Mitchell for ITV Channel 4 (Great Britain’s commercial channel, though
even here the commercials appear only between the shows, not during them), and narrated by Rosalie
Crutchley, Callas: Life and Art
tells a fascinating story and gets most of it right, though it has some of the
faults that rankle me in music documentaries and biographies generally: the
showing of actual performances only in brief, out-of-context clips and what I
call “first-itis,” the tendency of biographers in any medium to say the person they’re biographing was the
first to do something when in fact plenty of people were doing it before them.

In this case the bit of “first-itis” that particularly rankled me was the
assertion that Maria Callas was the first opera singer who bothered to act, who
made communicating the drama of opera as important a part of her overall approach
as singing the notes of the music. Utter nonsense! First of all, there was
Giuditta Pasta, whose heyday was the 1830’s, and while we have little or no
idea what she actually sounded like I’ve always thought she probably sounded
very much like Callas, partly because the reviews of Pasta that do survive describe both strengths and weaknesses
similar to those of Callas (her strongest suit, according to contemporary
critics like Stendahl and Chorley, was her vivid acting and ability to
communicate the drama of an opera; her biggest weakness was her wobbly high
notes) and partly because three of Callas’s biggest successes were in
Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and
Bellini’s La Sonnambula and Norma, all operas written for Pasta. And though Pasta
antedated the existence of audio recording by several decades, we do have
singers who were acclaimed as great singing actresses in their day — Geraldine
Farrar, Mary Garden, Rosa Ponselle — who did record; though we only have excerpts by which to
judge Farrar and Garden, Ponselle left behind two complete performances on
Metropolitan Opera broadcast recordings (both operas Callas also recorded,
Verdi’s La Traviata and Bizet’s Carmen), and her Traviata is a vividly dramatized interpretation that yields
little or nothing to Callas for dramatic impact and subtlety. Indeed, there are
striking parallels between Ponselle and Callas; both had relatively short
professional careers (Ponselle’s big years were 1918 to 1937, Callas’s 1947 to
1965), both were particularly famous for singing Bellini’s Norma, both were coached in that role (and others) by the
same person — Italian conductor Tullio Serafin (who controversially regarded
Ponselle as the better of the two; in a late-in-life interview he said that of
the singers he’d worked with there were three he called “miracles” — Ponselle,
Enrico Caruso and baritone Titta Ruffo — and he relegated Callas to the
catch-all category as one of “several wonderful singers” he’d also worked with), and both spent their last
years living as recluses, keeping up their vocal exercises and maintaining
dreams of a comeback (indeed, both tried comebacks — Ponselle in 1954 in a series of recordings made in her
home and Callas in 1973-74 with an international tour with tenor Giuseppe di
Stefano — and both used only piano accompaniment, not full orchestra, in these
attempts).

Anyway, this documentary about Callas told some of the familiar
stories and put some interesting “spins” on them, though this one didn’t
demonstrate (as the 1978 PBS film did) just what was so remarkable about the
incident that first catapulted Callas to stardom. In 1949 she was hired to sing
Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre
at the Venice opera, with Serafin conducting, and the other opera being given
in Venice was Bellini’s I Puritani,
a coloratura display piece usually cast with light, leggiero sopranos. One day, while she was sitting at the
piano rehearsing Walküre, Callas
got bored with all that Wagner and picked up the score of Puritani, sight-reading one of its arias. Serafin’s wife
overheard her just as she was finishing a phone call with her husband, who told
her that Margherita Carosio, the soprano who was supposed to sing the lead in Puritani, had fallen ill and wouldn’t be able to perform.
Mrs. Serafin told Callas to sing the Puritani aria for her husband, who in the meantime had been
calling all around Italy looking for a replacement soprano for Puritani, without success. Serafin heard Callas sing Puritani and told her flat-out, “You are going to sing Puritani in a week. I will arrange for you to have time to
study.” Callas, as she recalled it later, was flabbergasted — “I can’t!” she
said. “I have three more Walküres!”—
but decided that if someone of Serafin’s experience thought she could go in one
week from the big, heavy declamation of Wagner to the light, flexible singing
needed for Bellini, she’d take on the challenge. When she opened in Puritani she created a sensation, and though it would take
her a few more years before she got invited to sing at the world’s top opera
houses (La Scala in Milan, Covent Garden in London, the Met in New York), the
Venice Puritani was what
established Callas as more than just another young soprano, a remarkable talent
who could bring the dramatic fire needed to sing Wagner to operas by Rossini,
Donizetti and Bellini that had long been regarded as showcases for light-voiced
singers, and reach dramatic heights even in operas like Donizetti’s Lucia
di Lammermoor and Verdi’s Il
Trovatore with legendarily silly plots.
(Callas herself admitted to her record producer, Walter Legge, that part of the
challenge in being an operatic actress was that “some of the texts we have to sing are not distinctive poetry.”)

The film tells the familiar story of how
Callas cracked through the wall that after World War II dropped between the
world of classical music and the broader popular culture, though not always in
ways that helped her; Callas became tabloid fodder, at first from her feuds
with opera-house managers like Antonio Giringhelli at La Scala and Rudolph Bing
at the Met, and then when she met Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and,
though both of them were married to others, the two began an intense affair
that … well, other sources differ but this film definitely and emphatically
blames Onassis for ruining Callas’s career. That’s an arguable case but a bit
of an oversimplification; even before Onassis Callas had found herself drawn to
the world of high society, especially after she went on a 16-month diet
(inspired, according to Arianna Huffington’s biography, by the example of
Audrey Hepburn, the woman Callas thought was the epitome of glamour and whom
she wanted to look like) that turned her from a typically overweight soprano to
an internationally acclaimed beauty. (Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, who worked
with her on both ends of her diet, said when he first saw the “slim” Callas he
didn’t recognize her.) She had met the society hostess Elsa Maxwell and was
bewitched by the world Maxwell offered her, especially after the sheltered
existence she’d let up until then when she did almost nothing that wasn’t
related to opera — even her husband, Gian Battista Meneghini, an Italian
businessman who had made his money building a chain of car dealerships, was
more a professional partner than a personal one. Indeed, Meneghini took over
her management (and, as Walter Legge noted in his memoir, since he was still legally married to her
when she died he continued to manage her estate!), which as this film pointed
out meant that she didn’t get the leg up that professional managers of
classical artists could give up-and-comers — you book 10 of my lesser-known
talents or you don’t get my established star — but it also meant that she
wasn’t indebted to an agent pulling that sort of thing on her behalf. Callas
made it on her own and never let anybody forget it. Filmmakers Lewens and
Mitchell make their distaste for Onassis evident in just about every frame
devoted to him; indeed, though they don’t claim he whipped her or tied her up
or did any out-and-out S/M trips on her, their depiction of the Onassis-Callas
relationship sounds an awful lot like Fifty Shades of Grey: a mega-rich man subjugates a woman and turns her
essentially into his slave. Then, at least in the real-life version, he throws
her over and ends up with a woman who could give him even more glamour points:
Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the assassinated President of the United
States. What the film didn’t
mention is that as the marriage of Onassis and Jackie soured, he re-established
contact with Callas and essentially used her as a telephonic sounding board for
all his discontents with Jackie. One example: “She spends all this money — my money — on fancy clothes, but when does she ever
wear them? All I ever see her in
is jeans!”

One thing I hadn’t
known about Callas before is that some of the most embarrassing news stories
about her was faked; on January 1, 1958 she was supposed to give a gala
performance of Norma at the Rome
opera house, a huge state occasion which the president of Italy was scheduled
to attend. During the last rehearsals Callas realized she was coming down with
an illness, and it was going to be unlikely she was going to be able to make it
through the New Year’s performance, but she gamely went on anyway, only to
throw in the towel (so to speak) at the end of the first scene of Act I. The
surviving broadcast includes a lot of commentary from Italian announcers as to
whether or not she would return and finish the opera, and in the end she
didn’t, the rest of the performance was canceled (there had been no understudy
to “cover” her, though eventually soprano Anita Cerquetti was called in to
finish the rest of the scheduled run — and the Rome Opera sued Callas both for
the money and prestige they’d lost from her cancellation and the cost of
bringing Cerquetti in to replace her — Callas eventually won the case, but not
until 1965) and the tabloids reported it as “Another Callas Walkout!” This film
showed a quite snippy British newsreel about the event, claiming that if you
wanted to make sure to see Callas you have to get yourself invited to one of
her rehearsals, since at least those
she showed up for — and the makers of the newsreel presented a clip of Callas,
with a full orchestra behind her and two professional microphones in front of
the stage, singing Norma in Rome.
They said it was a rehearsal for the 1958 performance Callas had (allegedly)
walked out on, but it wasn’t: it was a telecast of a concert performance of Norma Callas had given in Rome three years
earlier. The fact that a British newsreel
company would deliberately fake a story just to make Maria Callas look bad and
contribute to the “dragon lady” reputation she’d already picked up from the
tabloids was shocking even by today’s standards of “news” manipulation.

Overall, the Callas phenomenon remains an enigma — how this woman could have
risen to the heights of operatic success, then more or less abandoned it all
for a jet-set lifestyle and ended so sadly, and also how Callas changed the
standards of opera singing for both better and worse (better in the sense that
she taught the next generations of singers that it was important to act in opera and not just sing; worse in the sense that
because she could get away with technical limitations, overall standards of
technique declined as later singers used Callas as an example to get away with
downright sloppiness — even Walter Legge said he felt Callas’s example would
harm future singers because they would “try to imitate not her virtues but some
of those things that she did deliberately and could only do because of her
intelligence and because she knew the dramatic purpose”) — though watching both
the documentary and the concert that was packaged as a bonus item, a telecast
from Hamburg on March 16, 1962 (during a three-year period in her career,
1961-1964, in which she gave up either performing or recording complete operas
and only did concerts and recital
albums), it’s astonishing how clean Callas’s singing is from a technical
standpoint. Yes, there are a few of the notoriously wobbly high notes that even
Legge, who signed her to a major-label record contract and was enormously
influential in building her career, ridiculed (“Can you, dear reader, swear
that you have never winced at or flinched from some of her high notes, those
that were more like pitched screams than musical sounds?”), but they are
awfully rare, and though there are those opera fans who believe that if Callas
had wanted to she could have salvaged her career by retraining as a
mezzo-soprano (the way Astrid Varnay did) and singing in the lower register of
her voice that was still beautiful even when her top got chancy and shrill, I
suspect that Lewens and Mitchell (and Arianna Huffington) are right that it was
Callas’s will to live and pursue a career, not the actual physical voice, that
failed her in the end. One of the interviewees in the documentary discusses
visiting Callas in her later days, as she played tapes of her old performances
over and over (significantly, she was far more interested in the live
broadcasts than in her studio recordings, apparently agreeing with her most
devoted fans that it was the live recordings that captured her at her absolute
best), and inevitably being reminded of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset
Boulevard obsessively looking at her old
movies as part of her own campaign to live in the past.

The Hamburg concert
shown here (rather sloppily; there were no subtitles to indicate what she was
singing about and not even chyrons to tell you what arias she was singing)
shows that, even this late in her career, Callas was a fully accomplished and
technically excellent singer (it’s interesting that the last selection on the
program is “O don fatal” from Verdi’s Don Carlos, one of those so-called “Falcón” roles — after a 19th
century French singer for whom a lot of them were composed — that lies on the
cusp between soprano and mezzo and was therefore more comfortable territory for
the Callas voice in 1962 than the upper reaches of the soprano repertory) and
those wince-inducing high notes were few and far between. What’s also interesting
about this, and all other Callas concert films that exists, is that — unlike a
lot of other singers — she did not let the fact that she was singing in concert
absolve her of the responsibility to act. Here she’s dejected in her opening
aria, “Pleurez, mes yeux” from Massenet’s El Cid (interestingly she’s playing the role of Chiméne
that was portrayed by Sophia Loren in the movie El Cid with Charlton Heston), flirtatious and charming in
the “Habañera” and “Seguidilla” from Bizet’s Carmen, ardent and hopeful as the “good girl” Elvira in
“Ernani, involami” (“Ernani, flee with me”) from Verdi’s Ernani, and world-weary in “O don fatal” (and after
watching the documentary one can’t help but wonder if Callas especially
identified with the Princess Eboli, who in this aria laments the “fatal gift”
of beauty that has distorted the way the world sees her). All in all, this
rather pretentious package (two CD’s and a DVD packaged in a small book)
nonetheless gives a good glimpse of Maria Callas the artist as well as Maria
Callas the celebrity — and one suspects the artist will survive and her work
will continue to enthrall and move people long after the sordid details of her
personal life and her relations with her bosses and her colleagues have been
forgotten.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Last night Charles and I watched a movie I’d recorded
earlier in the day from TCM, Witness for the Prosecution, which was based on a play by Agatha Christie that in
turn was adapted from a short story she wrote back in 1925 called “Traitor
Hands. It was published that year in a magazine called Flynn’s Weekly and then in 1933 appeared in book form in the United
Kingdom as part of a collection called The Hound of Death, though it wasn’t printed in the U.S. until 1948,
when it acquired the title The Witness for the Prosecution and was published in a collection called The
Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories.
In 1949 it was adapted by Christie into a play for early television, and in
1953 she rewrote that version as a stage play which was adapted into a film by
producers Edward Small and Arthur Hornblow in 1957. The film starred Tyrone
Power, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton, and was directed by Billy Wilder
— a formidable assemblage of talents indeed — from a script by Wilder and Harry
Kurnitz based on an “adaptation” of Christie’s play by one Lawrence B. Marcus.
When it was released in 1957 Christie proclaimed it the only movie based on any
of her writings that she had actually liked (though shortly before her death
she said she’d liked the 1974 film Murder on the Orient Express as well) and Tyrone Power said it was one of only
three films he’d made of which he was truly proud. (He didn’t mention the other
two, but one was almost certainly the 1947 film noir Nightmare Alley, a superb movie he’d fought to make.) Marlene
Dietrich said Wilder — with whom she’d already worked (though less
successfully) in the 1948 film A Foreign Affair — was one of the three best directors she’d ever
worked with, along with Josef von Sternberg and (surprisingly, given how little
they did together — just a joint acting scene in the 1944 film Follow
the Boys and her small character appearance
in Touch of Evil) Orson Welles.

The plot deals with aging British barrister Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles
Laughton) — based, Bette Davis said in her autobiography, on the attorney who
represented Warner Bros. in the lawsuit filed against her in England in 1936 to
keep her from breaking her Warners contract by working in Europe — who as the
film begins has just been released from hospital after a heart attack and is
suffering under the ministrations of Nurse Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester,
Laughton’s real-life wife), who’s determined to keep him on a strict diet and
away from brandy, cigars and anything else that might further foreshorten his life.
She’s also determined to keep him from taking on any high-profile criminal
cases and wants him to continue his career doing simple, easy, lucrative legal
tasks — the sorts of things that in the British legal system are generally the
duties of a lower-level sort of attorney called a solicitor, who basically does
corporate and business law while the higher-level attorney, a barrister, is the
one who actually represents people at trial. (Interestingly, Mexican law makes
a similar distinction between a licenciado, a business lawyer, and an abogado, a courtroom lawyer.) But Robarts gets a referral
from Mayhew (Henry Daniell), a solicitor, a murder case involving World War II
vet Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) — in the original 1925 story he was presumably
a Great War vet (“The Great War” was what World War I was usually called before
there was a World War II) — who while stationed in Hamburg as part of the
Allied occupation force in Germany after the war met and married Christine Helm
(Marlene Dietrich), an entertainer in what was left of the city’s cabaret
scene. Only the marriage wasn’t legal because Christine already had a husband
she’d wed in 1942, who was stuck in the Russian occupation zone (what
eventually became East Germany), and she made a fraudulent marriage to Leonard
to get herself out of Germany and keep from being forced to rejoin her husband
in the Russian zone.

The person Leonard Vole is accused of murdering is Emily
French (Norma Varden — she’s dead at the start of the story but she’s seen in flashbacks,
one of which contains a Wilderesque “in” joke — they run into each other at a
movie theatre that’s showing a cheap Western about Jesse James; in 1939 Power
had starred as Jesse James in a major prestige picture at 20th
Century-Fox about the legendary outlaw), a well-to-do widow whom Leonard was
hoping would back him in one of his inventions. She’s particularly impressed —
and her housekeeper, Janet MacKenzie (Una O’Connor, reunited with Elsa
Lanchester from the cast of The Bride of Frankenstein), is equally put off — by a bizarre contraption
that’s supposed to be a new kind of egg beater that not only beats the eggs but
separates the whites from the yolks. At first Sir Wilfrid is going to be a good
little boy and refer Leonard’s case to fellow barrister Brogan-Moore (John
Williams doing the same sort of drollery he pulled in Dial “M” for
Murder and The Solid Gold
Cadillac), but in the end — especially
after giving Leonard his famous “monocle test” (he shines reflected sunlight
from his monocle into Leonard’s eyes and determines, based on Leonard’s
reaction, that he’s telling the truth) — he takes the case himself with
Brogan-Moore sitting second chair. When Sir Wilfrid meets Christine he’s taken
aback by her coolness and her seeming willingness to put the noose around her
husband’s neck, since she not only comes into his office cool as the proverbial
cucumber in the best imperturbable manner von Sternberg taught Dietrich, The
case against Leonard looks solid — he had a shaky alibi to begin with (reliant
on Christine’s testimony, which she’s already told Sir Wilfrid was merely what
Leonard told her to say), he came home from discovering Mrs. French’s dead body
with bloodstains on his coat sleeve, and he has 80,000 pounds’ worth of motive
— the legacy Mrs. French had just left him in her recently changed will, which
disinherited her housekeeper and therefore gave her just one more reason to hate Leonard. The trial
looks to be going wretchedly for Leonard when Sir Wilfrid gets a phone call
from a Cockney woman offering to sell him evidence that will discredit
Christine, who had appeared as the prosecution’s star witness (unprotected by marital privilege since
her marriage to Leonard was bigamous and therefore illegal), a series of
letters between her and a lover named Max. Sir Wilfrid meets the mystery woman
at a train station — and we can
tell, even though we’re supposed to believe he can’t, that she’s Christine in
disguise (and Dietrich’s Cockney is absolutely convincing); the letters
discredit Christine’s testimony and Leonard is acquitted, but then there’s a
typical Christie-ian surprise ending that was supposed to be such a jolt that
over the closing credit there’s a voiceover telling the audience not to reveal
it to their friends.

Witness for the Prosecution isn’t a great piece of storytelling — though at
least the characters have a little
depth and are not just Christie’s usual stick figures — but what makes this a
great movie is Wilder’s direction (though the film is based on a stage play and
most of it takes place on just one set, the courtroom in London’s Old Bailey
where the case is being tried) and the bravura performances of his three leads.
Laughton is, well, Laughton — in his memoir Hollywood Garson Kanin said Laughton (whom he directed in the
film They Knew What They Wanted)
was the sort of person who is difficult not because he particularly relishes
being difficult but because he knows being difficult will make him the center
of attention. Sir Wilfrid is the sort of character who also fits that description
— whether badgering his nurse or his witnesses (especially the horribly hostile
Christine and Janet), the super-lawyer seems more interested in making a great
impression in court and getting everyone to Notice
him than in winning his case. Tyrone Power, in his last completed film — the
next year he started Solomon and Sheba, also with Edward Small producing, and shot about three-fifths of it
before dying of a heart attack (Yul Brynner replaced him — and had to cover his
famous bald pate with a wig so they could still use the long-shots of Power) —
looks seedy and middle-aged, but he turns the loss of his good looks and his rather shaky acting skills to his advantage;
even his occasional overacting works as the reaction of a highly theatrical con
artist to being suspected, rightly or wrongly, of a horrible crime. And then
there is Dietrich — what can we say? It’s a film redolent of her past — the
cabaret she performs in during the flashback sequence is called Der
Blaue something-or-other (I couldn’t make
it out) and her song, “I May Never Go Home Anymore” (music by Ralph Arthur
Roberts, lyrics by Jack Brooks), is essentially “See What the Boys in the Back
Room Will Have” meets “The Laziest Gal in Town” — and she’s superb as the
morally ambiguous woman who hides whatever it is she’s actually feeling under
that dark, impassive mask and matter-of-fact personal style. Though it’s not as
good a movie as Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard or Ace in the Hole (none
of Wilder’s post-Ace in the Hole movies
are; he never really recovered from the box-office failure of Ace and his subsequent decision to leaven his cynicism
with comedy), it’s still a finely honed film with three great actors, a story
that for all its faults at least provides them a sturdy framework, and a
director who knows how to make even as ridiculously theatrical a property as
this come alive and “live” on screen. I did wonder, however, why Turner Classic Movies, usually
very good about letterboxing, showed this in a pan-and-scan print that all too
often left people with only slices of their faces on either end of the screen!

Monday, February 16, 2015

I ran a show I’d recorded off NBC the night before: a
rebroadcast of the very first episode of Saturday Night Live, aired on NBC October 11, 1975. There’s been a big
to-do about the 40th anniversary of this long-running program — it’s
become a weird sort of national institution even though I’ve believed it should
long since have been put out of its misery — and before re-running the first
episode NBC did a 2 ½-hour commemorative special that I turned on briefly, saw
a bit of a lame parody of record ads on late-night TV (a homely singing duo
hawking their “romantic” album and singing excerpts of the songs, all of which
had incredibly lame sexual references — one of the annoying things about the
current Saturday Night Live is
how many sketches they do in which they take a dirty joke that isn’t
particularly funny to begin with and run it into the ground until it becomes really offensive), then turned it off in disgust. I was
curious about the first episode because I didn’t watch it when it was new — I
watched a bit of it, but for some reason I’d been under the impression that it
was going to be a music show with a few comedy sketches in between the musical
acts, when in fact it was the other way around. I was interested because one of
the musical guests was Janis Ian, then riding high on her big hit “At 17,” and
the same night PBS had shown a special pairing Ian with the pioneering
jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears. I liked the idea of being able to see
Janis Ian twice on different networks on the same night, but that’s not how
things turned out; when I switched from PBS to NBC all I saw were a bunch of
people I’d never heard of doing comedy, and whether it was any good or not I
didn’t care because I wanted to hear more Janis Ian!

As things turned out, the
host of the first Saturday Night Live was George Carlin — then the show was simply called Saturday
Night to avoid confusion with the
much-ballyhooed ABC series Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, which featured a troupe of sketch comedians called
the “Prime Time Players” — a name the Saturday Night people, mainly producer Lorne Michaels, decided to
parody by calling his comedians
the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players.” That’s the name that’s stuck, though in
the opening of the first episode announcer Don Pardo garbled it as “The Not For
Ready Prime Time Players” and at the end they were called the “Not Really Ready for Prime Time Players.” This first Saturday
Night Live was aired just under a decade
after the death of Lenny Bruce, and it was clear from the choice of George
Carlin as the first host that initially Lorne Michaels and his writers (many of
them veterans of the Harvard Lampoon
and others who also acted on the show) were going for the quirky mix of
situational humor, raunchy but still tasteful farce, and both political and
cultural comment that Bruce had pioneered in the stand-up world and of which
Carlin had been his principal heir. The differences in format between this and
later Saturday Night Live shows
include the heavy featuring of the MC — Carlin has virtually half the screen
time and his routines include some of his greatest hits (baseball vs. football,
the oxymoronic nature of“jumbo
shrimp,” his reflections on the non-perfect nature of God — “Just look at his
creation” — and some stream-of-consciousness ramblings ending with the
rhetorical question, “Have I told these jokes already?”) — as well as the
appearance of two musical acts,
Janis Ian and Billy Preston, doing two songs each.

Ian does “At 17” midway
through the program and an even more reflective song, “In the Winter” (playing
piano instead of guitar), at the end. At the time Ian was in the middle of a
comeback after a flash-in-the-pan success, “Society’s Child” (in which she
portrayed a woman being dumped on for dating a Black guy), in 1966; she’d been
signed by Columbia and “At 17” became an enormous hit despite — or maybe
because of — its sometimes cryptic lyrics. She’d make a few more albums for
Columbia but never again reach that kind of chart success, and eventually
they’d drop her, she’d continue making occasional records on her own and
playing whatever gigs she could get, and finally in 1993 she came out as a
Lesbian on the release of her first independent album, Breaking
Silence, and married her longtime partner
Pearl Snyder in 2003 in Canada. (That certainly put a new spin on the tag line
of her famous song, “At 17 I learned the truth.”) Billy Preston was at, or
possibly slightly on the downgrade from, the career peak that had begun with
his signing to Apple Records in 1969, his guest appearance on keyboards on the
Beatles’ “Get Back”/“Don’t Let Me Down” single, and his own mega-hit “That’s
the Way God Planned It.” On this show he did what was probably his second most
famous song, “Nothing from Nothing” — which, as Charles noted, was also
basically a gospel song presented in a secular context (as Ray Charles had done
before Preston and Sister Rosetta Tharpe had done before either of them!) — and
a new song called “Fancy Pants” that also sneaked in a God reference or two.
What was really amazing from the Zeitgeist point of view was that in a line from “Nothing from Nothing” Preston
proudly proclaims, “I’m a soldier in the War on Poverty” — the very idea of a war on poverty is so dated these days, when all
Republicans care about is the rich and all Democrats care about, even
rhetorically, is preserving what’s left of “the middle class”; neither big
party gives a damn about the people below that! Afterwards Preston had some of
the usual music-star troubles — alcohol, drugs, health problems therefrom and
legal charges, including one that he sexually assaulted a teenage Mexican boy
(so both the musical guests on
the first Saturday Night Live had
same-sex attractions!) — and he was in and out of rehab, had a kidney
transplant and finally died in 2006. As heard here, Preston’s music is
essentially the last gasp of funky soul before, as I put it in connection with
Willie Hutch’s soundtrack to the 1974 Blaxploitation film Foxy Brown, Black music “sank first into the swamp of disco and
then into the cesspool of rap.”

The sketches on this first Saturday
Night Live also raise Zeitgeist issues; one in which Chevy Chase introduces an
obviously male cast member (complete with neatly trimmed beard) as his “wife”
and tells us how committed he is to “her” is still funny but plays very differently in the age of marriage equality! (In
1975 I still hadn’t come to grips with being Gay — that would come two years
later when a man made a pass at me in the hallway to the San Francisco State
student bookstore and I took his number, spent a sleepless night and realized
at about 1 a.m. that I was going to call him — and had I watched this show when
it was new I would have been astounded at the idea that it would ever be legal
in the U.S. for a man to marry another man, and even more astounded that I
would end up marrying a man myself.) So does George Carlin’s rant about the
intrusiveness of airport security; you want to take him aside in this post-9/11
age and say, “You think it’s bad now?
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” Some
of the sketches and routines (two guest comedians, the legendary Andy Kaufman
and the virtually forgotten Valri Bromfield — that’s a woman, and “Valri” is
obviously short for “Valerie” — appear, Kaufman lip-synching to the Mighty
Mouse theme song and Bromfield doing a not
particularly funny domestic routine hundreds of other more recent female
comedians, from Elayne Boozler to Tammy Pescatelli, have done better since)
seem badly dated and groan-inducing, but there are also some surprisingly
subtle bits (like a courtroom scene — featuring later Law and Order:
Special Victims Unit star Richard Belzer as
one of the jurors — in which a woman testifying against her alleged rapist is
so embarrassed at what he said to her that she gets permission to write it down
instead of having to repeat it verbally in open court; one would welcome a bit
more of that reticence from the SNL
writers today!) and pieces that hold up today as well as pieces that don’t.

One
of the latter is a really unfunny barbarian bit by Jim Henson’s Muppets
(there’s such a legend around Henson these days it’s hard to believe he ever
did anything as lame as this!); one of the former is a short film called The
Impossible Truth, written and directed by
Albert Brooks (yet another SNL vet
who went far in mainstream showbiz!) and screamingly funny in a deliberately
retro (even then!) way, particularly when a spinning newspaper headline
announces that Oregon has just lowered the age of sexual consent to seven and
the next thing we see is Chevy Chase chatting up a little girl in a bar. (That,
too, is one routine that because of Zeitgeist changes plays a lot differently now than it did
then.) The first night Saturday Night Live wasn’t quite yet the well-oiled laugh machine it became at its height
in the late 1970’s, before it became so dull (when it wasn’t going out of its way to be offensive) that I
remember joking for years, “Nostalgia is being able to remember when Saturday
Night Live was still funny and when Michael
Jackson was still Black.”

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Yesterday’s Metropolitan
Opera Live in HD telecast was of a peculiar
double-bill of two one-act operas, Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (the original Hungarian title, A kékszakállú herceg vára, literally translates as The Blue-Bearded
Duke’s Castle, but his title is usually
left off when the opera is performed outside of Bartók’s native Hungary).
“Nothing says ‘Happy Valentine’s day’ like an opera about a serial killer of
women,” Charles joked about the presence of Bluebeard’s Castle on the bill. The idea of presenting these two
operas together was that of the director, Mariusz Trelinski, a Polish filmmaker
who’s apparently never done an opera before but thought these two would work
together because they’re both about romantic obsession — though as the double
bill unfolded it was clear that what really linked the pieces is the concept of
light, and the symbolic significance of light, even though the two composers
and their librettists (Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest for Iolanta and Béla Balázs, who later collaborated on the
adaptation of the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht Threepenny Opera for the 1930 G. W. Pabst film, for Bluebeard’s
Castle) have diametrically
opposed views of the symbolic nature of “light.” The Tchaikovskys present
“light” in its usual symbolic meaning of “enlightenment,” of coming to a
broader understanding of who and what one is and the actual truth, while Bartók
and Balázs have — pardon the pun — a darker view of “light,” as a force that
penetrates and reveals truths that would better be left hidden. Based on a
Danish play called King René’s Daughter by Henrik Hertz, Iolanta is a story of a young woman (Anna Netrebko) who was born blind. To keep
her from being traumatized by her disability, her father, King René (Ilya
Bannik), has locked Iolanta in a room where she’s taken care of by three nurses
(whom Trelinski and costume designer Marek Adamski decided to dress like nuns)
and where the very concept of sight is kept from her; as far as Iolanta knows, the
only function of eyes is to produce tears. René is so determined to maintain
Iolanta’s isolation that he’s posted a sign on the door to the cottage where
she lives stating that anyone who enters will be executed. Needless to say,
someone does crash Iolanta’s cottage —
the tenor lead, a French knight named Vaudémont (Piotr Beczala, whom we’ve
encountered on previous Met telecasts and the second syllable of whose name is
pronounced with an ugly throat-clearing sound it’s hard to square with “-zala”)
— who shows up with his friend Robert (Aleksei Markov), who at first seems like
the usual tenor’s dumb sidekick but turns out to be considerably more important
than that.

Robert sings an aria that seems to have got the biggest applause of
any of the principals’ solos in which he says he doesn’t want a girl with an
ethereal air about her like Iolanta; he wants someone more down-to-earth and
he’s already picked her, Matilda (a character we hear about but never actually
see). Vaudémont falls in love with Iolanta at first sight and they sing a big
duet. Meanwhile, René has brought in a Moroccan doctor, Ibn-Hakia (Elchin
Azizov), who says he has a treatment that stands a chance of giving Iolanta
sight — but only if she wants it, meaning that in order for the treatment to
work she first must know she’s
blind and other people aren’t, the awareness her dad has been keeping her from
all these years. In the opening of the telecast Elchin Azizov was introduced as
someone who’s sung the title role of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (now there’s a Russian opera for you!) and who’s also participated in productions of
Wagner’s Ring — it didn’t say what role
he’d sung but, based on his performance yesterday, he certainly has the voice
for Wotan and, though all the principals in yesterday’s Iolanta were excellent, it’s Azizov from whom I’d really
want to hear more. Anyway, Iolanta’s dad René catches her and Vaudémont
canoodling and asks Vaudémont if he didn’t see the sign warning that anyone
entering Iolanta’s cottage would be put to death. Vaudémont said he did, and
René asks him, “But you went in anyway?,” to which I was tempted to joke, “Of
course I did! I’m a typical operatic tenor, and we do stupid things like that.”
René eventually agrees to spare Vaudémont’s life, but as for marrying Iolanta,
René says he can forget that because when she was still a child he promised her
to someone else — and Robert (ya remember Robert?) drops the bomb that he’s the someone else Iolanta is promised to but he
really doesn’t want to marry her because he’d rather be with Matilda (ya
remember Matilda?).

So René agrees to
release Robert from his vow to marry Iolanta, leaving her free to marry
whomever she wants, and just at this juncture she decides she wants to be able
to see after all, so Ibn-Hakia (ya remember Ibn-Hakia?) gives her the treatment, it works, only when
Iolanta finally can see she’s momentarily unsure the visible world is all it’s
cracked up to be. Nonetheless, she agrees to marry Vaudémont and all ends
happily. (It occurred to me that if Verdi had been writing this, he and his
librettist would have had René kill Vaudémont and insist that Robert marry
Iolanta, whereupon she would have killed herself. Verdi and his usual
collaborators weren’t ones to end an opera with a wedding when they could end
it with a bloodbath!) Iolanta is an interesting and sometimes moving opera but also a problematic
one; one Fanfare reviewer suggested that
Tchaikovsky identified with Iolanta because he too felt isolated from the world
of normal human relationships — not from being blind but from being Gay — but
that really doesn’t come through in the opera. Tchaikovsky actually wrote 11
operas but he’s primarily known to modern-day classical music lovers for the
last three symphonies, the 1812 Overture and the big ballets, particularly The Nutcracker. Amazingly, when it premiered in 1890 at the St.
Petersburg Opera it was actually presented on a double bill with a complete
performance of The Nutcracker — 19th century audiences had a lot more stamina than we do!
It occurred to me that before composing Iolanta Tchaikovsky had set an almost identical story in
the ballet Sleeping Beauty — and the ballet has considerably more variety and is simply a more
compelling piece of music. Iolanta’s big scene at the beginning (with commentary
from her nurses) and the love duet with Vaudémont both sound awfully droopy
after a while, and suddenly Tchaikovsky will interrupt the love stuff with
martial music announcing the involvement of René, Robert and the other
characters from the more action-adventure parts of the story, creating a
jarring effect.

Of Tchaikovsky’s 11 operas only two ever made it within hailing
distance of the international repertory, Eugen Onegin (which I regard as a crashing bore, all the more
infuriating because the novel by Alexander Pushkin on which it’s based is an
absolutely wicked and brilliant piece of social satire that in the hands of
someone more cynical and less sentimental than Tchaikovsky — Prokofieff, maybe?
— could have been the basis for a great opera) and The Queen of Spades (a nice work, everything Onegin was not, in which Tchaikovsky mostly kept to the
hard edges of his source story, also by Pushkin). I’d rate Iolanta on the basis of this one hearing as above Onegin but below Queen of Spades — and the Met contributed its usual (these days)
mix of spectacular singing and silly production. Iolanta’s cottage is a room
that gets pushed around on the big turntable of the Met’s stage so we either
see her or not depending on the demands of the action. The direction is
workmanlike but not especially inspired, but the singing was great: Netrebko,
singing in her native language and in a role for which her basically lyric
soprano is the right sort of voice (as opposed to the Met Lucia di
Lammermoor, also co-starring Beczala,
in which she was clearly uncomfortable with all that coloratura ornamentation),
gets the most out of the music. Beczala copes well enough with a typically
undercharacterized tenor-idiot role and the other singers are formidable,
especially given the relatively unimaginative music Tchaikovsky gives them to
sing. That’s the problem with Iolanta; its music is appropriate for the story and superficially expressive,
but there aren’t any really great tunes and it gives the story the right
overall emotional climate but doesn’t really stir the heart — and Trelinski’s
rather silly production, which he said was based on the look of 1940’s film
noir but really wasn’t (about
the only concession in that direction was having the characters wear at least
vaguely modern dress), balanced on the thin edge of risibility — you wanted to
walk into the stage and say, “Iolanta’s not blind — just dizzy from the way you
keep turning her house around on that damned turntable!”

Bluebeard’s Castle was another matter entirely: a great opera (Bartók shows such a mastery of the form
it’s amazing this was his only opera!), elegantly and (once you accept the basic assumption at its
core) logically plotted, with two great roles for soprano and baritone. This
time Trelinski’s direction seemed to come from the horror films of the 1950’s
and 1960’s — indeed one could readily imagine the story of Bluebeard’s
Castle as a horror film from that
period with Vincent Price, an actor able to bridge the gap between courtly and
mean as only two of his predecessors (Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) had been,
as the menacing but superficially attractive Bluebeard. Indeed, Charles noted
the similarity between Bluebeard’s Castle and the best-selling novel (just released as a movie) Fifty Shades
of Gray: both are about mysterious
super-rich men who have somehow managed to entice young, naïve women to run off
with them and become their sex slaves. At the start of Trelinski’s production
of Bluebeard’s Castle we see a
dark wood and a car pulling up — from the fancy headlights (three on each side)
we guess it’s a vehicle from the late 1950’s and the woman who emerges from it,
Judith (Nadja Michael), is dressed in a cocktail-party dress with a tight top
that shows off her nipples — she looks hard-bitten but not totally dissolute.
She announces that she has left her father, mother, brother and fiancé to run
off with Bluebeard (Mikhail Petrenko, who oddly came off as sexier in the tight
blue jeans he was wearing for his pre-taped opening interview than in the suit
he wears in the opera itself) and live with him in his mysterious dark castle.

The castle consists of a hallway and seven mysterious rooms Bluebeard insists
on keeping locked. Of course, Judith — in the tradition of overly curious women
that began with Eve and included Elsa in Lohengrin — demands that Bluebeard open each of the rooms in succession and basically throw
light on his darkest secrets. Room one is an S/M torture dungeon; room two is
full of weapons; room three is full of gold and jewels; room four opens a
window to Bluebeard’s mines and landed estates, the sources of his wealth; room
five turns out to be the entrance to a lovely garden; room six is a pool of
tears, and room seven … well, let’s just say that your traditional idea of who
Bluebeard was and what he did to the women he enticed into his lair is not
quite reflected in this story, based on a fairy tale by Charles Perrault (who
was essentially interested in collecting French folklore and fashioning it into
commercial literature the way the Grimm brothers were doing in Germany and Hans
Christian Andersen in Denmark); Bluebeard’s previous wives are still alive but
in a zombie-ized state, totally divorced of any will of their own and following
his bidding without question, and as the opera (at least in Trelinski’s
production) ends with Bluebeard descending into a half-dug grave and embracing
a corpse that appears to be Judith once she enters her ultimate role as yet
another member of Bluebeard’s zombie harem. This time the music was remarkable,
fully characterized and vividly dramatic, and Trelinski’s production matched it
ably; though no medium short of actual film could do justice to the scene
changes as Bluebeard and Judith make it through the seven rooms and she spots
the blood in or on virtually every object that mars its beauty, Trelinski did a
damned fine job, creating a surprising number of different visual atmospheres
that communicated both the beauty and horror of each room. The singers, too,
excelled in music that gave them far more to work with than Tchaikovsky’s
amiable meanderings; aided by Bartók’s insightful (though almost continually
dissonant) melodic lines and his vivid orchestration, they created two fully
fleshed-out characters, at once believable and symbolic.

Interestingly, a
decade before Bartók worked on this opera (he began it in 1910 and finished it
in 1917), the French composer Paul Dukas did an opera on the same story, Ariane
et Barbe-Bleue, though his was taken from
a Maurice Maeterlinck play based on the Perrault tale, and he and Maeterlinck
used the story’s ending — Ariane/Judith tries to get Bluebeard’s other female
captives to rebel, and they refuse, telling her they’re perfectly happy where
they are — to make an anti-feminist, anti-Leftist point that it’s impossible to
“liberate” other people and it’s best just to leave them alone and let them be
happy in the ways that suit them. Bartók and Balázs have a considerably darker
view of the tale; it’s unclear from their ending whether Bluebeard’s other wives are alive, dead (except in the
vividly expressed fantasies of them in Bluebeard’s last aria) or in some state
in between, and (fittingly for a libretto writer who was called on to adapt
Brecht and had solid Leftist credentials himself) there’s an implicit but
unmistakable critique of the rich and how they can literally turn anything, including fellow human beings, into their
possessions. A vividly sung, intelligently produced presentation of a far
richer, deeper and more interesting work, Bluebeard’s Castle triumphed where Iolanta sort-of did O.K. — Iolanta isn’t a bad opera, but it’s hardly alive to the potential complexities of the story
whereas Bluebeard’s Castle seizes them; it’s not surprising that Iolanta is a virtually unknown opera while Bluebeard’s
Castle has at least a toehold in
the repertory and probably would get performed even more if it weren’t for the
twin handicaps of length (about an hour, lengthened here by some sound effects
Trelinski added as some of the rooms are opened, which means it has to have a
double-bill partner) and language. When it was first done outside Hungary
performances were usually in German, and the first U.S. productions were sung
in English (I’d like to hear it that way some day!) — indeed, the official
score contains the text in Hungarian (which the Met used), German and English,
and the English translation was done by the composer’s son, Peter Bartók.

The film was The Red
Balloon, a 1956 film made in Paris
by Albert Lamorisse, who cast his real-life son Pascal as the human owner of
the titular character, a red balloon that is his only friend; it follows him around,
tries to accompany him to school, hangs out all night outside his bedroom
window so he can fetch it again the next morning, and in general shows
capabilities that tread just on the thin edge of believability without
stretching into the out-and-out supernatural. Lamorisse père both directed and wrote the film, and he won the
Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1956 — the only time that award
has been given to a film of less than feature length (34 minutes). The movie
premiered in the U.S. as an episode of the General Electric Theatre TV show — albeit in black-and-white — and while
the U.S. distributor flooded the American school system with 16 mm prints for
audio-visual showings for years I’d only seen it on black-and-white TV and
therefore I had to take it on faith that the balloon was red. In some ways it’s
two different films depending on whether you see it in black-and-white or
color; in black-and-white the atmosphere young Pascal (the character has the
real name of Lamorisse fils) is trying to escape — the world of schoolhouses, buses, bakeries and
other adult environments hostile to him traipsing around with a balloon as his
pet — looks grungier and more oppressive, and in some ways the balloon itself
is a more effective symbol of freedom if it’s not this huge neon-red dot maneuvering itself around
the frame of the film. (The effects were mostly done with wire work, and an
imdb.com “Goofs” contributor identified at least one sequence where the wire
could be seen.)

At the end our little hero is confronted by a gang of bullies
who are determined to get at him by destroying the red balloon; one of them
takes it out with a well-aimed blow from a slingshot (a surprisingly
frightening image for what’s until then been a pretty guileless children’s movie)
and its skin starts to curdle, making it resemble a relief globe of the moon
(well, if the moon were red, anyway), until either he or another of the bullies
— Lamorisse père keeps them powerfully
ambiguous instead of allowing them to become distinct characters — denies the
poor red balloon a decent death by stomping on it. Then, in Lamorisse’s famous
fairy-tale ending, all the
balloons in the Ménilmontant district of Paris (where the film takes place)
depart their owners and flock en masse to little Pascal, raising him above the city and above the petty
hatreds of the kids who bullied him. As a bullied kid myself, I identified with
this film big-time, and seeing it now that I’m an old and jaded adult I still identify with it even though it does become a bit too precious, a bit too cute, at
times. Certainly Albert Lamorisse and his wife Satine lucked out in the genes
department producing their leading man; Pascal is ineffably cute — tow-headed,
not too skinny, not too fat, with a guileless look of innocence on his face and
a bod (especially as shown off by the grey flannel outfit he wears in the first
half) that probably made any NAMBLA members watching this film cream in their
pants. It looks different to me now than it did when I was Pascal Lamorisse’s
age in the film but it still holds up surprisingly well — and it’s just the
right length to sustain interest in its rather slender story (avoiding a
mistake Lamorisse père made
four years later when he attempted a feature-length sequel, also starring his real-life
son).

I ended up running for Charles and I one of those
vest-pocket documentaries on movie stars that used to fill out the schedule of
the TNT (Turner Network Television) channel back when it was Ted Turner’s basic
movie channel — they showed a lot of the same stuff they show now on TCM, only
with commercial interruptions (I recorded the 1931 version of The Maltese
Falcon on VHS, editing out the commercials
as I went, and this remained my basic library version of that movie until the
far more famous 1941 version came out on DVD and included the two earlier ones
as bonus items) — in this case it was Fred MacMurray: The Guy Next
Door, and it focused on how MacMurray had a
long career based on his sheer ordinariness: he didn’t “go Hollywood,” he didn’t put on any
movie-star airs, he married twice but that was only because his first wife died
tragically young (and his second wife, the actress June Haver, was interviewed
for this show, along with one of their two adopted daughters), and with two
major exceptions all the roles he played were basically decent “guy next door”
types with whom the audience could identify. The two exceptions were his two
films for director Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity (1943) and The Apartment (1960), both of which he got into virtually by
accident. Wilder, interviewed for this program, said he’d had no trouble
finding the female lead for Double Indemnity — he wanted Barbara Stanwyck from the get-go and
once she read the script she said yes immediately — but a lot of actors turned
down the male lead because they didn’t want to play murderers on screen. Wilder
finally worked his way down the Hollywood food chain to George Raft, at liberty
because Jack Warner had just fired him, only Raft said he’d play the part only
if the script were rewritten to make him an undercover FBI agent out to entrap
the Stanwyck character in a murder rap.

So in desperation Wilder asked his
studio, Paramount, for a list of the actors they had under contract who hadn’t won the right to refuse a role — and when he saw the
list he lighted on MacMurray’s name. The more he thought about it, the more
Wilder decided that he could tweak MacMurray’s image so he could be believable
as a murderer and the audience
would be shocked when nice-guy Fred turned out to be a money- and
lust-motivated killer. (Wilder also had trouble getting the man he wanted for
the second lead, Edward G. Robinson; he sent the script to Robinson’s agent,
heard nothing back, and by accident ran into Robinson at a party and told him
he wanted him for Double Indemnity
but hadn’t heard back from him. This was the first time Robinson himself had
ever heard of the project, and when he called his agent the next day the agent
said, “We didn’t send you that script because you’d only be billed third in
it.” Robinson demanded to see the script, read it overnight, and the next day
he called his agent and said, “I don’t care if I’m billed tenth. The next time you get a script that good for me, I
want to see it!”) MacMurray also got into The
Apartment by accident — the part of the
lascivious boss who’s having an adulterous affair with the elevator girl
(Shirley MacLaine) and treating her so shabbily she attempts suicide had
originally been intended for Paul Douglas, but Douglas had a heart attack and
died four days before shooting was to start — and with no time to waste Wilder
called MacMurray and MacMurray came. (I think he was better in the part than
Douglas would have been — Douglas would have just made the character an asshole but MacMurray vividly
brought the strain of self-righteousness the part required; here as in Double
Indemnity, MacMurray’s years of playing
unambiguous good guys added depth as well as surprise to his portrayal of a
villain.) The show did a whirlwind tour through MacMurray’s early years, in
which he started as a band musician (his dad had tried to teach him violin, but
MacMurray — whose original first name, unmentioned here, was “Loren” — was
enough of a youth rebel and a jazz-age baby that he preferred to play
saxophone, and some of Albert Haim’s WBIX Internet radio shows have featured
bands MacMurray was in), got his break on Broadway when he graduated from the
pit band of Three’s a Crowd (1930)
and Roberta (1933) to the actual
stage, then to a Paramount contract where he was mainly a foil for comedy
queens like Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard. (MacMurray remembered Lombard
as his most creative co-star and said she actually improvised a lot of the
dialogue in their films together.)

The show also mentioned MacMurray’s
marriages, his drift down the showbiz ladder to Western roles like the silly Quantez for Universal-International, and the revival of his
career playing in Walt Disney’s film The Absent-Minded Professor (the narration of this film said that Disney had
seen a scientist lecture and was so taken with the real-life professor’s
absent-mindedness he decided to make a film based on him — though elsewhere
I’ve read that MacMurray’s character in The Absent-Minded Professor was really based on Disney’s own father, inveterate
tinkerer and would-be inventor Elias P. Disney) and the TV show My
Three Sons. MacMurray’s daughter also told
the story of why he backed away from edgy roles like his one in The
Apartment; one day he took his daughters to
Disneyland and a woman approached him. Thinking she was going to ask for an
autograph, MacMurray got ready to sign — only it turned out she was there to
chew him out and take a poke at him for the horrible way he’d treated Shirley
MacLaine in The Apartment.
MacMurray got the message never again to take a bad-guy role that would
undermine his “guy next door” image! There’s also a fascinating vest-pocket
interview with Beverly Garland, who played MacMurray’s wife on the last (of
nine) season of My Three Sons,
and originally wanted to play her with a certain degree of feistiness and
independence the way Mary Tyler Moore was doing on The Dick Van Dyke
Show at the time — only after her first day
on the job, she was lectured by no fewer than five “suits” at CBS telling her
that she needed to be demure, unquestioning, obedient, the loving helpmate of
the “togetherness model” books on marriage that were being shoved down women’s
throats back then and contributed to what Betty Friedan called “the problem
that has no name” and ultimately the (welcome) rebirth of American feminism.